I think everyone should understand how to get traffic to your blog before worrying about how to put it together. After all, building a blog is a lot easier today as compared to five or ten years ago. And, I’m not talking about the free choices in blogging, but more about the self-hosted blog accounts using platforms such as WordPress. Yes, you can literally put a blog together in a matter of minutes and with a little touch-up, tweaking, and fine tuning, you’d be ready in no time to showcase your talents to the world. I think that’s more of the easy part, the challenging part is getting traffic to your blog without having to spend a fortune.

Here’s a few basic and simple tips on how to get traffic to your blog for free…

Provide content that can be easily shared with others

Recognize what your target audience wants and what they’re likely to share with others. Some people constantly share content that they find interesting, it’s a natural instinct for them. For others, it’s simply waved off or ignored altogether. Either way, your content needs to provide a reason to be shared. It needs something that makes it useful for others to read. There will always be issues within any given niche and a specific or targeted audience that is searching for help and solutions. How to get traffic to your blog for free comes from your content, which should provide informative, engaging, and useful ideas and suggestions that assists people in discovering solutions. From there, your readers will often be encouraged to share your content with others.

Optimize your blog

Many people who use blogs and even those who are new to blogging don’t take the time to optimize them. There’s so much value in using SEO and an advantage over other bloggers. Whether you use the popular WordPress platform to host your blog or some other platform, SEO is an easy enough strategy for getting traffic that every blog owner should utilize. Everything from forming titles, sub-headings, descriptions, keyword usage, and more should be included in your optimization.

Analyze your traffic

This is something that every blog should be doing, knowing where your traffic is coming from. If you are using self-hosted WordPress for your blog, there’s no reason not to be using some form of Analytics such as the Google Analytics plugin. You’d be surprised at the number of blogs that forget or even ignore this step. There’s a lot of useful information that can be used to help develop and grow your site. Just knowing where your visitors came from can help you target specific areas for additional traffic. Analyzing your data will go a long way in helping you to improve your blog, your traffic sources, and your opportunities for growth.

Don’t forget the images

Adding images to your content can be a powerful strategy in gaining readers and traffic. Images help to break-up content and make it more interesting. It provides a visual representation of what your content is about. It can also serve as another source for search engine traffic. That’s right! Whether you realize it or not, images are used for search and it’s done each and every day on the major search engines. Of course, in order to rank with your images, you’ll need to optimize them just as you would with your other content. This includes using a related title and an alt tag. One helpful suggestion here when it comes to using images. There are millions of websites and blogs online today and that often means that some blogs will utilize the same free images as everyone else. Be creative and make your site original.

Take some time and research for keywords

You’ve probably heard and already realize that keyword usage is a necessity. It’s pretty much a requirement if you want your content ranked within the search engines, especially if you want to get traffic to your blog. It’s part of optimizing your site for the best results and includes not only individual keywords, but also more valuable keyword phrases or what’s commonly referred to as long-tail keywords. Because of that, spend a little time and do some research, after all, it’s a big part of getting traffic for free from the search engines.